This is classic Art-to-Part stuff right here. We've taken this project from 3D moldel all the way to final parts. A customer of ours made a 4ft long, 1/18 scale model of a Volvo 70ft open ocean racing sailboat. He asked to have vacuum form molds for the deck and hull made in order to produce ABS plastic shell to make remote control boats. The first step was to digitize his scale model and use it as reference to create a perfectly symmetrical 3D model. We then used to 3D model to design a deck mold and a hull mold. The molds go down to a flat surface. We supplied the customer's vacuum form vendor with 3D files to create trim fixtures.

Once we designed the molds, we cut them out of MDF stock on our largest CNC machine. Run time was approximately 3 hours each including setup.